US envoy warns of Iraq civil war

LE

The US ambassador to Iraq has said that continuing sectarian violence there had the potential to turn into civil war.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Zalmay Khalilzad indicated that the US had little choice but to keep a strong military presence in Iraq.

He added that the dangers of conflict would be lessened if Iraqis agreed on a national unity government.

But US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the media had exaggerated the severity of recent violence.

At a Pentagon briefing, Mr Rumsfeld also said there had always been the potential for civil war in Iraq.

LE

I still can't believe that despite the time-gap between GWI and GWII, seemingly scant predictive analysis was done about a post-Saddam scenario. A cursory glance at the population statistics show that it was a nightmare waiting to happen if it wasn't managed properly. I certainly don't have access to all of the data that the coalition powers have, but I don't think that enough troops / infrastructure support personnel were committed in the immediate post-war period in order that civic amenities were restored with all possible speed, thus the seeds of discontent were sown early, making subsequent recruitment of support for insurgent groups easy.

I know that it was never going to be an easy transition: for simple reasons of trust the old regime structure (including the army and the police-force) had to be completely disabled, but if an invading power is going to do that, wholesale replacements have to be shipped in - something the Nazis were actually very good at.

LE

The analysis was done - but as it conflicted with the prevailing groupthink it was ignored. General Shinseki stood up to Rumsfeld and demanded more troops, and was promptly sacked and replaced with a more compliant individual. The US have always had some excellent analysts, it's just that the current administration doesn't listen - or worse, places its own appointees into intelligence agencies to make sure their outputs stay "on-message".